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Mystery 'Missile' Identified As US Airways Flight 808
sean.peters writes "The mystery missile discussed on Slashdot Tuesday? It was US Airways 808 from Honolulu to Phoenix. An amateur sleuth checked the time against airline schedules, then the following day, checked out a webcam that was trained in the appropriate direction. He found the exact same contrail at the time AWE808 was coming over. The author deals persuasively with a number of objections to his argument."
I wonder if that UN Ambassador feels silly about his comment that it was probably a display of power aimed at asian nations... Why would the military perform a missile launch to beat their chest then deny that they did it? XD This news is going to be devastating to conspiracy theorists. No wait, denial and facts fuel that fire, nevermind.
check out the Mp3 Garbler I built!
So I'm assuming you'll provide a decent, sane way to falsify your hypothesis? Or are you just going to reject every amount of data as possibly (sorry, I meant obviously) being tainted by THEM and part of your scary scary conspiracy?
Except that you can verify. You can look up the what time this flight left. You can use a bit of deductive reasoning, a little bit of knowledge about flight paths, and the publicly available Standard Instrument Departures for the given airport to figure out an approximate location and altitude that the plane would be at a given time. You can even, apparently, if the summary is accurate, look back at random webcams that were pointing in the right direction at the right time to see if the plane is there and leaving a contrail.
So yeah, if you believe that the government can create that good of a cover story with that much independent evidence in a 36 hour period, well, you have more faith in government agencies than I do.
It's called a horizon and Phoenix is "EAST" of Hawaii.
Wish there are more such amateurs tracking the money and misinformation spread by everyone about politics.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
More likely, the FAA and DoD just aren't organized for this kind of investigation. If you had gotten on the phone with the FAA or an AFB while the thing was in the air and said "What the heck is that? It's tracking heading 270, at somewhere between 20 and 30 thousand feet", you would could have gotten the answer instantly: "identifies as flight 808 out of LA". As it is, it seems like no one was really interested in this until it got put on the news that night, well after it would beyond radar range. So far as I know, the airports and Air Force bases don't keep recordings of their radar tracks, they have no way to look back at what was happening at that time.
"I don't care who said it was a plane flight"
The battle cry of the uninformed conspiracy theorist...
I've seen two, very slightly different, angles of the object and the orange light is only present in one of them. Seems to me that a rocket exhaust should be quite visible regardless of the angle, and that it's appearance/disappearance would make a reflection seem more likely. As for the contrail forming right on the object, if it is an airplane most of it's velocity is directly away from the camera. There could be a mile between the contrail and the plane and from that angle it would look like they were right next to each other.
Depends on what you mean by air defense. If you mean an automated system that can shoot down ballistic missiles then no. There has been work on that off and on, that's what the whole "Star Wars" project is/was. However nothing operational at this point, or at least nothing that is admitted to (and that is the kind of system where publicly admitting it is useful).
In terms of defense against air attacks? Yes, tons. The US has a bunch of air bases all around its borders. The Air Force and Air National Guard operated bases in most states with fighters (F-16s and F-22s mostly) to deal with threats. In terms of tracking incoming craft, that is done on a continuous basis by massive radar installations. The PAVE PAWS radar arrays provide complete coverage of the US borders out to very long distances (like 3000km). All inbound craft are tracked and known.
So what's the deal here? Well the deal is nothing happened, that's what. There was nothing out of the ordinary so nobody noticed anything. All commercial flights are well known. They file flight plans, keep ground controllers appraised of their progress, and show up on civilian radar. See the radar you get at airports actually isn't normal radar. It doesn't track any object in the sky, it is Secondary Surveillance Radar. Rather what it is doing is looking for transponders. All commercial and private planes have to have one that say who they are. So what happens, more or less, is the radar says "Hi who are you?" and the plane responds "This is my callsign." Works great and makes tracking much easier, you don't have to have someone analyze the radar signals to tell if they are real returns or not (radar can get returns off of birds, air currents, etc if the power is high enough) and you can keep easy track of what everything is.
A plane that has an active transponder and a known flight plan is nothing out of the ordinary. There are thousands a day. So nobody takes any notice, that is shit working how it should. So when the military was asked "Did you do this?" they truthfully answered "No we didn't." When the FAA was asked "Did you see anything weird?" they again truthfully said "No we didn't." Because neither had seen anything weird, no evidence of any problems, they didn't go digging. The military isn't going to go all crazy because there is a picture of a contrail. The PAVE PAWS in Beale didn't see anything problematic, who gives a shit?
I am guessing IUSS was also clear of any unknown subs and so on.
Nobody noticed anything because there was nothing to notice, except visually, and neither the DOD or FAA check that because it isn't useful. Everything in terms of monitoring was fine. They may have opened an inquiry in to what happened so they could give people an answer, but that can take time since it isn't high priority and you want to give a correct answer. Or they may have just not given a shit since it was clearly just someone who'd snapped a picture of a jet and didn't know what it was. They knew it was NOT a missile as that would have been tracked.
It's not bizarre. It depends what you presume.
Presume the DoD *did* do it. Ok, then they should be able to get an answer out pretty quickly. You know, a cover story or whatever.
Assume they *didn't* do it. They obviously aren't paying much attention. Nobody on watch called the DoD and said "Hey, just want to let you know, a jet just left a contrail. Thought I'd notify you." So the DoD know they didn't do it, assume it is not a missile, and thus don't care. Why assign someone to look into it? They DID give a public answer, didn't they? Or at least, parts of the armed forces did: they denied it. That's an answer, isn't it? It's not necessarily up to them to investigate, quickly, every single jet contrail that someone says "ahhhh it's a missile launch!"
So if you presume the DoD didn't do it, then 36 hours isn't bad. Apparently, the media doesn't really care. Afterall, a "it was a jet flying a normal pathway" story isn't going to sell much. On the other hand, a "secret missile test [in broad daylight]" story is a good seller.
So maybe: the armed forces/DoD/Pentagon didn't do it. The news media don't care because they realize they didn't do it, and a story about a jet taking off isn't very interesting. So it only took 36 hours for a random guy to put all the pieces together and give a good answer.
Do the media and government lie? Of course they do, I'm no fool. However that does not mean that they lie about EVERYTHING, and it does not mean this wasn't just an airplane. The camera operator tracked the object for ten entire minutes. If it's a missile, it's the slowest moving missile, ever.
But you do apply the razor when evaluating whether or not someone is actively concealing data.
There were hundreds of thousands of digital cameras in range of this event, and there's not one image from another angle that clearly shows a rocket launch instead of an aircraft contrail which has been posted to flickr. Is it simpler to think that all such images have been suppressed, or that there simply never were any?
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Do you know how the radars track things? Do you know how the data is stored an analyzed? Do you know what procedures are in place for answering civilian inquiries on this? If you don't know, and it is clear you don't, then why should it be "easy"?
What you are doing more or less is arguing from ignorance, you are doing the same shit stupid managers to do IT and developers all over: "I don't understand how this works so I assume it is easy, and I get mad that you cannot deliver it to me easily and quickly." You know fuck-all about what you are talking about, so you just assume it should be "easy" and that they are either incompetent or evil because they won't just pop off an answer straight away.
Seriously, the idiot content on Slashdot never ceases to amaze, especially for a site where the users value themselves as being smart geeks. A statement like that only makes you look like a colossal moron with regards to air defense, and to the events of 9/11 themselves.
The whole reason that worked as it did was precisely because it was a terrorist act, using civilian airliners. Nobody realized anything was wrong until it was too late. Why? Because they were supposed to be there. These were scheduled commercial flights, they were squawking idents, everything seemed fine. The US does not go around shooting down all commercial airline traffic, for good reason.
All that has absolutely nothing to do with air defense in terms of hostile craft coming in from outside the borders, which is what is begin talked about. If an airline enters US airspace and it isn't scheduled and/or isn't transmitting ident as it should, some fighters will come to meet it. Actually they meet it long before it gets to US airspace, when it got to US airspace would be when it would get shot down.
This happens all the time with Russian Bear bombers. In a silly "Our military penis is as big as your military penis," game, they send Bears over to the US coast. They are traced by PAVE PAWS, and F-16s fly up to escort them. They fly around, and then return home. Nothing comes of it because they aren't breaking any rules, however if they continued towards the US and breached US airspace, they'd get splashed (Bears are designed to carry nuclear weapons).
If the difference between that and 9/11 aren't apparent to you, well, then I don't know what to do to help you.